absolutely losing it

Dustin had commandeered over the passenger seat, clipboard on one knee, pen already uncapped and hovering. Outside, Hawkins was dark and empty, streetlights buzzing a sodium-orange. “Rope?”

“Check,” Steve drawled, throwing his head back against the headrest. His eyelids felt like they’d been scraped raw. Somewhere under the hood, the engine continued ticking with Dustin’s voice.

The clipboard in Dustin’s hand had been through hell. Coffee-stained, corner-bent, covered in Hopper’s aggressive handwriting and what looked like jelly from someone’s sandwich. The kid held it like it was the fucking Declaration of Independence.

“Flares?”

“Check.” Steve’s voice came out flat and bored. He’d been awake for something that felt like thirty-six hours and the exhaustion was crawling over him like a second skin.

“Duct tape?”

Steve let the silence stretch just because he could. Just because Dustin’s need to control every microscopic detail of this supply run was grating against his skull like sandpaper, and maybe if he waited long enough, the kid would remember that Steve wasn’t actually his employee.

“You didn’t get duct tape?” Dustin’s voice climbed half an octave.

“No shit, I got duct tape, Henderson.” Steve didn’t bother opening his eyes and just jerked his thumb toward the passenger side floor where their haul sat in a milk crate he’d swiped from behind Melvad’s. “It’s right there with everything else. So—can we just, not? I’m fuckin’ starving here.”

Dustin’s pen scratched against the paper. Check. That was both satisfying and infuriating. “Generator?”

Generator. Fuck. Fuck, this was bad. Steve’s fingers went still on the steering wheel.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, so—” Steve dragged his palms down on his face, felt the stubble he hadn’t bothered shaving this morning catch against his skin. When he finally opened his eyes, he couldn’t quite look at Dustin. Instead, he twisted in his seat, peering in the back like the generator would materialize if he looked hard enough. “That’s on me.”

For a second, Dustin just blinked, then stared. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again.

“Are you serious right now?”

“Look I know—”

“Steve.” The clipboard hit Dustin’s thigh. “Hopper specifically asked us to get the generator this time. That was—literally—the one thing he stressed on us getting. Did you seriously forget how long—”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” Steve’s voice came out higher than he meant it to, loud enough that it echoed in the enclosed space. He caught himself and tried to reel it back. “I get it, okay? What do you want me to do about it now?”

“I want you to not forget the one thing—”

“Well, too fucking bad, Henderson—”

“Stop being such an ass—”

“Stop being so fucking annoying.”

Dustin let out a sharp breath, and Steve took that as him realizing this situation was bigger than their bickering and back-and-forth. His expression was replaced by that calculating look he got when he was working through a problem. Steve hated that look. It usually meant he was about to be dragged into something he didn’t want.

“Okay.” Dustin’s tense shoulders dropped. “Okay, what now?”

Steve stared through the windshield at the empty parking lot. There were some lights in the houses across the street that were on, while some had just turned off. Hawkins looked so unbelievably normal sometimes, it was scary what was actually going on while people went about their days.

“Well, nothing’s open.” Dustin was speaking slower now, like he was thinking out loud. When Steve didn’t respond, he added, “There’s a farm like three miles out. They probably have, like, three.”

Steve’s hand was already moving to the ignition. If that was it, then he was doing it. If not for completing the list, it was for getting Dustin to shut up.

“Hey, that was a joke.” Dustin’s eyes went wide. “Don’t go to the farm. It’s literally midnight—”

The engine turned over, rumbling to life beneath them.

“Well, you said they’ve got three.” Steve checked the rearview mirror out of habit, even though the area around them was completely empty. “What’s the problem if one goes missing?”

Dustin stared at the side of Steve’s face like Steve was about to rob a bank. “Uh, I don’t know, Steve. Maybe the part where farms actually use their generators? Cows don’t get milked, fences stop working, and suddenly we’ve got the Upside Down and horses to take care of?”

“Quit being dramatic,” Steve muttered, already backing out with one arm draped over the back of the passenger seat. “It’s a farm, not a zoo.”

In all honesty, Steve had no idea what stealing from the farm entailed. But he was sure it wouldn’t be as bad as Henderson implied it would be.

The farm materialized soon enough out of the darkness like something from a postcard; all white fence posts catching the van’s headlights, a barn that looked older than Steve’s grandparents (and they were pretty damn old), fields stretching out into nothing. Steve killed the lights before they got too close, letting the van roll to a stop near a cluster of outbuildings.

“Okay, so.” Dustin was gripping his seatbelt like it was the only thing tethering him to the world. “You go in there. I’ll stay here as a lookout.”

“Jesus—lookout?” Steve turned to stare at him. “This is a farm, not Fort Knox.”

“Exactly. Which means they probably have dogs. Big dogs that eat kids when they trespass at—” He checked the watch on his wrist. “Twelve forty-seven in the morning.”

“You’re coming with me.”

Dustin laughed, but it was devoid of any humor. “I’m really not.”

“You’re the one who suggested this—”

“As a joke. A hypothetical. I didn’t think you’d actually—” Dustin gestured wildly at their surroundings. “This is breaking and entering. This is a felony.”

“I’m borrowing.”

“That’s theft.”

Steve was already opening the driver's side door, letting in the cool night air that smelled like grass and something else, flowers, maybe. Sweet and overwhelming. "Just—keep the engine running. If I'm not back in ten minutes, I don't know, honk or something."

"That's your plan? Honk?"

Steve was out, shutting the van door as quietly as he could, which still sounded loud enough to wake the dead. He stood there for a second, letting his eyes adjust, tracking the layout. The barn was the biggest structure, paint peeling and sturdy-looking, the kind of building that weathered through decades and refused to quit. There was a smaller building that might’ve been a garage, and beyond that was rows of something. Maybe plants? They caught the moonlight in a way that made them look almost silver, organized in careful lines that spoke to hours of work.

A dog barked in the distance. Steve’s heart picked up. But it was far away, probably near the house, and after a second it went quiet again.

The barn door wasn’t locked. Of course, it wasn’t locked because why would anyone think someone would want to steal from here? He slipped inside and was immediately hit with the smell of hay and motor oil and animals, a warm, living smell that was somehow comforting despite the circumstances. Though he couldn’t see any livestock because it was too dark. He pulled out the flashlight he’d grabbed from the van, clicked it on, and kept the beam low.

The barn was bigger inside than it looked from outside, cluttered with chaos that probably meant it was organized in a way only a few people would know their way around. The tools hung on pegboards, their shapes casting strange shadows. Hay bales stacked in one corner neatly. A workbench was covered in half-finished projects; a birdhouse, a broken fence post, a coffee can full of nails sorted by size. There was a jacket hanging on a hook that looked soft and worn. The whole place had this feeling of being used, and being important.

The generator was exactly where a generator would be, against the far wall, industrial and humming, plugged into what looked like a small electrical panel. Steve made his way over, careful not to trip over the collection of tools and equipment scattered across the floor. A chicken made a disgruntled noise from somewhere above him, nestled in the rafters. He nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Okay,” he muttered to himself, crouching down to examine the setup. “Okay, this is fine. Just unplug it, carry it out, we're golden.”

The generator was bigger than he’d anticipated. It was probably heavier, too. And there were multiple cords snaking out of it, disappearing into walls, running to… Shit, he had no idea what they were running into. Steve reached for the main power chord and wrapped his fingers around it.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Steve’s heart actually stopped. It flatlined for a solid second before kicking back into overdrive. He whipped around so fast he nearly knocked the flashlight out of his own hand.

You were standing in the doorway. For a second, Steve couldn’t process what he was seeing.

You had a shotgun—that registered first, survival instinct kicking in as he widened his eyes and raised one hand to the side—but you were also holding a plate. A plate with what looked like chocolate cake. You were backlit by the moonlight, wearing cutoff sleep shorts and an absolutely massive flannel shirt that hung off one shoulder, hanging open over a faded tank top that said something he couldn’t read in the dark. Your hair was falling out of a braid.

Steve’s brain couldn’t process you holding a shotgun at him.

“Holy shit,” he managed to say.

“Yeah.” Your voice was softer than he’d expected. It sounded more tired than angry, like this wasn’t the weirdest position you’d been put in, and maybe was the weirdest thing that had happened today. “You wanna tell me what you’re doing in my barn, Harrington?”

“Uh—” He short-circuited for a moment, eyes zeroing in on the gun. “Can you—” When you didn’t move, he walked slightly closer, raising his hand and hovering over your arm. “Please put that down.”

Even though he wasn’t close enough to catalog the details of you, he could see a smudge of chocolate cake at the corner of your mouth and your eyes that shined bright against the angle of his torch. The flannel had small flowers embroidered on the pocket. Daisies. Definitely daisies. He knew you. Not knew you-knew you, but he’d seen you before. Definitely. Hawkins was small; you’d been a year or two behind him in school, maybe? He had this vague memory of you in the hallway, always surrounded by a small group of girls who seemed to actually like each other. Benny on the team had said something about you once, the farm girl who wouldn’t go out with him, and Steve had tuned it out because guys on his team were always running their mouths about something.

You looked at him, but you were still holding the shotgun. Your posture had relaxed slightly, like you were slowly figuring out the guy with big hair and huge ego wasn’t the biggest threat to your life. Your grip was competent—you clearly knew how to handle it—but there was something tentative in it, too, like you’d rather be holding anything else.

“Please,” he repeated, eyes flicking down to your hand as his hand hovered uselessly over it.

You sighed, tilting your head back slightly like this was the last place you wanted to be. “Not until you tell me why you’re trying to shut down half of our work.”

Steve pressed his lips into a straight line as he scrambled his brain for some words. “Can’t really talk much while I have a girl about to shoot me, can I?”

He straightened up slowly, giving you what he hoped was a disarming smile (literally, in this case). The same one that would work on girls at parties, before his life became a nightmare of interdimensional monsters and constant exhaustion. He was pretty sure he’d lost whatever charm he used to have somewhere between a Demogorgon and the Russian elevator.

You scanned his face for a moment, and Steve caught the slight roll of your eyes. Your face shined half-gold from his flashlight beam, half-silvered by the slice of moon coming through the door. Steve was distracted enough by it that he almost missed the eye-roll entirely.

“Thought these things were meant to get people to talk.” You waved the gun loosely in your palm—barrel dipping enough that his stomach dropped with it—and Steve widened his eyes.

In Steve’s experience, there weren’t a lot of life-threatening props that could get people talking if they didn’t want to. “Please. Don’t—do that,” he said carefully, tracking the movement of your hand holding the weapon. “Just set it down, okay?”

He kept his palms half-up, an instinct trained into him, he was sure, from cop films he’d watched as a kid.

“Mm, okay.” You set the gun down with the plate on a hay bale carefully. The fork clinked against the ceramic. You looked almost relieved about not having to wield a weapon anymore. “I’m listening.”

“We need it,” he said, which was possibly the weakest opening he’d ever delivered. “It’s—there’s a situation. Kind of an emergency.”

“An emergency?” Your voice was soft, and there was something in it that might’ve been concern. “What kind of emergency needs a generator?”

“The kind I can’t really explain.”

“Try.”

Steve’s jaw worked around the air in his mouth for a second, chewing on an answer that didn’t exist yet.

“I—” Steve ran a hand through his hair, a nervous habit he’d never managed to break. Though tonight his hair was damp enough at the roots that his fingers just dragged flat against it, no bounce left in the strands at all. You watched the movement, your eyes following his hand and returning to his face. There was something unnerving about being looked at that directly. “I know how this sounds, but it’s important. Life-or-death important. And I swear—I swear—I was gonna bring it back.”

“When?”

“Huh?”

“When were you gonna bring it back?” You took a step closer, tilting your head, and Steve could see your eyes better now, they caught the moonlight streaming through the barn doors, reflecting it back. “Tomorrow? Next week? Or were you just hoping nobody would notice that half our farm stopped running?” You sounded a little curious, and maybe a little sad.

Steve tried to rack his brain for an answer. “Henderson said you had three,” he offered weakly.

“Henderson? Who’s that?” Your eyebrows went up, disappearing behind the hairs falling on your face. “Dustin Henderson? He’s involved in this?”

“Life or death?” he repeated, quirking a brow like that explanation may fare better.

You studied him again, crossing your arms over your chest. “Why were you unplugging the main one when there are five of them that aren’t being used?”

His brows furrowed. “There are—?” You turned your neck to the left, and Steve followed your movement and he was met with—as you said—five unused generators sitting on top of a platform closer to the ceiling than the ground. “Oh.”

The tips of his ears went hot. He met your eyes again, then said, “Can I—”

“No,” you said, and now you sounded almost exasperated. “You said life or death?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it drugs?”

“No,” Steve said immediately, because that, at least, was the truth.

“Whose life?”

Steve hesitated. He couldn’t tell you the truth about El, the monsters living under this town, or the crawls that amounted to nothing new 99.9% of the time. But he also got the feeling you’d know if he lied. There was something in the way you were looking at him, patient and expectant, that made him not want to lie, either. Shit.

“My friends’,” he said quietly. “Maybe the town’s—I don’t know. I know this sounds insane.”

“It does.” You were quiet for a minute, then shrugged. “But you sound like you mean it.”

Steve watched you move to the hay bale where you'd set your plate, picking it up again. You took another bite of cake, thoughtful, and gestured with the fork.

The smell of chocolate finally cut through the barn’s thicker smell of hay and motor oil, and Steve’s stomach gave an audible, humiliating growl in the quiet.

“My dad taught me how to shoot when I was twelve,” you said, conversational, like you were sharing a story over coffee. “Said I needed to protect myself. But I’ve never actually pointed it at anyone before tonight.” You licked the icing off your thumb absentmindedly. “I don’t think I could actually shoot someone. Especially over a generator.”

“That’s—” Steve tracked your thumb for a moment. “That’s probably good. Not shooting people. Good policy.”

You smiled at that, just a little. “So, you’ll return the generator?”

Steve’s shoulders pulled back as he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. I promise.”

Steve caught the resignation as it crossed over your features, and you slumped back to lean against the wooden wall. “Okay. If you can get it down from the shelf and carry it out without my dad or brother noticing, you’re good.”

Something in his chest loosened as he nodded slowly. He’d won the generator. Then, he realized—glumly—that this conversation was ending, which meant that he’d have to go back to the van where Henderson was doing ‘lookout,’ and deal with trying to console the uncalled for anger towards him without snapping, because that would only make Henderson’s situation worse.

He should have been halfway back to the van by now. Instead his feet had planted themselves between the hay bales and he was scrambling for something—anything—to keep this conversation from ending. He vaguely gestured with the tip of his chin at the plate. “Cake looks good.”

Something in your eyes lit up. “Yeah—yeah. It’s really good. Fresh, too. Baked it just tonight.”

“Yeah?” Steve leaned against the hay loosely, crossing his arms as he looked at you, and he found he actually wanted to know the answer when he asked, “You bake?”

You paused, fork hovering mid-air. “Yeah. Sometimes. We’ve got all the stuff for it. Makes it easier.”

“I don’t think I’ve baked anything. Like, ever,” Steve said, musing.

There was a beat of suspended silence where the barn creaked around you, wood settling and something rustling in the rafters. Steve used the pause to tilt his head slightly and look at you properly for the first time since the gun had come down—past the adrenaline and flashlight glare—and found you softer for it, sleep-mussed and unbothered by any of it.

“You want some?” you asked, holding the plate out toward him. “If you promise not to unplug anything in this place without permission.”

Steve blinked. “Cake?”

You tilted your head, nose scrunching slightly. “Unless you thought I was offering the fork.”

“Yeah.” Steve found himself moving closer without deciding to, drawn in by the casual offer and the way you held the plate out like sharing cake with a would-be thief was the most normal thing in the world.

“Yeah,” he said again, because his vocabulary had apparently shrunk into single syllables. “I’m—yeah. Hungry.”

You pulled the fork back, studied it for a second like you were just realizing you’d been eating off it, then glanced around the barn. “Hold on.” You set the plate back down on the hay bale and disappeared into the shadows near the workbench.

Steve stood there, hands shoved in his pockets, listening to you rummage through drawers. There was the sound of metal on metal, a quiet “aha,” and then you emerged back into the moonlight holding a second fork. It caught the light as you held it up, triumphant.

“Emergency fork,” you explained, completely serious. “My dad’s always losing them out here when he eats in the barn.”

“Right.” Steve couldn't help the smile tugging at his mouth. “That’s good planning.”

You returned to the hay bale, picked up the plate again, and this time you held it out, your hands holding the clean fork, too. Steve took it, fingers brushing yours for half a second. Your hands were cold, he noticed, and he had this insane urge to do something about it, like wrap them in his, maybe, or do some gesture he had no business making to someone he hardly knew.

Before he could impulsively act on anything, you were angling the plate between you both.

“Go ahead,” you said, nodding toward the cake.

Steve cut off a piece with the edge of his fork, and the second it hit his tongue he almost groaned. The rich, dark chocolate, perfectly spongy, with thick fudge frosting that tasted homemade in a way that made his chest ache a little. When was the last time he'd had something that wasn't frozen pizza or day-old donuts from the station? When was the last time he ate something that hadn’t gone through factory-like processing of stages?

“Holy fuck,” he said through a mouthful, forgetting his manners entirely. “This is—so good.”

The features across your face lit up, a smile spread slow across your lips. “Yeah?”

“Seriously. Best cake I’ve ever had, probably.” He wasn’t even exaggerating. He took another bite to prove his point. “What do you even put in these?”

You laughed slightly. “Don’t oversell it, Harrington.”

“I’m not.” He swallowed.

You ducked your head a little, and even he could feel your cheeks getting warmer. “It’s just chocolate cake. Nothing too crazy.”

“Yeah, but it’s—” Steve struggled to find the words. “It’s good. You made it good.”

The barn felt smaller somehow, warmer, like the walls had drawn in to hold just this moment. You took another bite of cake, thoughtful, and Steve watched the way you savored it, unhurried. Granted, the cake may have tasted so good because he hadn’t eaten in a few hours, but he was sure it’d be just as good after a full meal.

“You know,” you said, voice soft, “when I heard someone in the barn, I thought maybe it was a raccoon. Or maybe Clover slipped out of the house.” You glanced up at him through your lashes, that small smile still playing on your mouth. “Steve Harrington wasn’t really on my list of possibilities.”

“Yeah, well.” Steve rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “Lately my life’s been full of things that weren’t on anyone’s list of possibilities.”

Curiosity and concern flickered across your face. You opened your mouth like you were gonna ask about that, and Steve tensed up because he knew he couldn’t explain any of it, and outright lying to you just felt wrong. But before you could speak, a horn blared from outside, sharp, loud, and completely unmistakable.

“Shit.” Steve’s eyes went wide.

The horn honked again, longer this time, and you jumped, the plate wobbling in your hands. “What—”

“That’s—” Steve was already moving toward the door, then stopping, then turning back because he couldn’t just leave you there. “That’s Dustin. I told him to honk if—I told him ten minutes and it’s been—” He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes. Time had gotten completely away from him, dissolved in the warm safety of this barn.

You were staring toward the barn door, fork still in hand, confusion written across your features. “Is he okay? Does he think something’s wrong?”

“No—I mean, yeah, he’s fine. I told him to honk if I took too long.” Steve ran a hand through his hair, agitated. “He probably thought I got caught or—” Dustin honked again, shorter this time. “Jesus, Henderson.”

You set the plate down carefully, that same deliberate gentleness you'd shown with the shotgun. “You should go check on him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I should.” But Steve couldn’t move immediately. He looked at you, standing there in your sleep clothes with chocolate on your fingers and concern on your face for a kid you didn’t know. “Thank you. For the—not shooting me. And for the cake. And for the generator.”

You smiled at that, amused. “Pretty low bar there, not shooting you.”

“Still.” He meant it more than he could really articulate standing in this barn at one in the morning with his brain fuzzy from exhaustion and sugar and something else.

You studied him for a long moment, then seemed to come to some kind of decision. “You guys want some cake for the road?”

“For the road?” Steve repeated quizzically, still processing the offer through the haze of interrupted eating and Dustin’s increasingly frantic honking.

“Yeah.” You were already moving, picking up the plate. “I mean, I made way too much. And you said you were hungry.” You glanced back at him over your shoulder, and there was something so shy in your gesture as you shrugged loosely. “Seems like you and your friend could use it more than me.”

Another honk split the night air, and Steve winced. “He’s really—he’s not usually this impatient.”

You shrugged again. “He’s worried about you,” you said, like it was the most natural thing ever. “That’s sweet.”

Steve hadn't really thought about it like that. He'd been annoyed, mostly, at Dustin's inability to just sit tight for twenty minutes without spiraling. But you were right, underneath all the anxiety and the need to control every variable, Dustin had been scared something happened to him. But Steve really didn’t want to leave to talk about the Upside Down and everything horrible that goes with it.

“Yeah,” he said, softer now. “I guess.”

You disappeared through a door he hadn't noticed before—the one that probably led into the house—and Steve was left standing there, listening to Dustin honk again. He stuck his head out of the barn.

“I’m coming!” he called toward the van, probably too loud. “Two minutes!”

He could see Dustin's silhouette jerk in surprise, then the kid was rolling down the window, his voice carrying across the distance. “You said ten minutes, Steve! It’s been seventeen.”

“I know! I’m getting—just hold on.”

Steve ducked back inside, running his hand through his hair, and found you returning with a wicker basket that looked handwoven. It was lined with a kitchen towel printed with strawberries, and you were carefully settling the remainder of the chocolate cake inside, wrapped in plastic wrap that caught the light.

“Here.” You pulled two glass bottles from where you’d tucked them under your arm, setting them in the basket. “Lemonade. Made it this morning—well, yesterday morning, technically.” You paused, studying the contents. “You think that’s enough?”

“No—this is—” Steve moved closer, staring at the basket like it might disappear if he looked too hard. “This is more than enough. This is—you don’t have to do this.”

You looked up at him, and your expression was so earnest it made his chest tight. “Hey, it’s no big deal. There’s genuinely too much of everything here.”

There was something fragile in the space between you, in the way you were looking at him like he was someone worth taking care of. Steve couldn't remember the last time someone had done something like this for him, not because he'd charmed them or convinced them or because they wanted something in return. Just because they wanted to. Just because they were kind.

“Thank you,” he said, and it came out rougher than he meant it to.

You smiled, ducking your head again in that way that made him want to see you do it over and over. “It’s just cake, Harrington.”

It wasn’t, but he didn’t know how to explain what he meant. That in the world he’d become so accustomed to, the world with monsters and too much death, there was someone who he hardly knew offering him things just because they could tell he needed it.

Another honk, more tentative this time, and you laughed softly. The sound was like wind chimes, delicate and warm.

“You really should go,” you said, holding out the basket. “Go calm your friend down and I’ll have the generator down by the time you get back.”

“You don’t have to do that—”

“Steve.” You were halfway up the ladder now, looking down at him, and hearing his name in your mouth made his pulse stutter because you said it without the edge people often used with his name. “I’ve got this. Go.”

The walk back to the van felt surreal, the basket swinging in his hand, its weight solid and real. The night air was cool against his face, carrying that flower smell again, stronger now, or maybe he was just more aware of it. The fields stretched out on either side of him, rows and rows of what he couldn't identify in the dark, organized and cared for.

Dustin had the passenger window rolled down, his face pale in the moonlight. “Finally! Steve, I thought—” His eyes landed on the basket. “That’s not a generator.”

Steve pulled open the driver's side door, setting the basket carefully on the seat between them before sliding in. “Cake.”

“You were gone so long getting cake?” Dustin’s voice rose slightly. “I thought you were caught. I thought they were processing you through some machine—I was literally about to go in there and—” He stopped, staring at the basket. “You did get the generator, didn’t you?”

Steve pulled back the strawberry-printed towel, revealing the plastic-wrapped chocolate cake and the bottles of lemonade nestled beside it. “Yeah, yeah” he muttered absentmindedly. “Gonna get it now.”

Dustin eyed the cake. He climbed out of the van, and headed back toward the barn. You had the generator on the ground now, had somehow managed to haul it down by yourself. You were crouching next to it, coiling the cord into a neat loop, your flannel falling off one shoulder to reveal the strap of your tank top. You looked up when you heard his footsteps, and smiled.

“That was fast,” you said, standing. There was a smudge of dust on your cheek now, and your braid was even messier than before.

“He’s fine.” Steve moved to the other side of the generator, testing the weight. It was heavy, but manageable. “You got this down by yourself?”

“I live on a farm,” you said teasingly. “I’m stronger than I look.”

Steve believed it. “Still. That’s—thanks. For all of this.”

You walked with him toward the barn door, your footsteps quiet beside his heavier ones, and Steve was hyper-aware of your presence beside him. The way you moved, unhurried and graceful even in bare feet. The way you smelled like vanilla and chocolate and that flower sweetness that seemed to cling to everything in this place.

When they reached the entrance, you stopped, hanging back in the shadows where the moonlight didn't quite reach. Your arms wrapped around yourself, and Steve noticed you shivering slightly. The flannel was big but thin, and the night had gotten colder.

“Hey, be careful,” you said, soft enough he almost missed it. “With whatever you’re doing. Be safe.”

The words hit Steve sideways. Be safe, like you actually cared about what happened to him after he drove away.

“I will,” he said, and it came out like a promise.

Your smile was small and sweet, catching just enough light for him to see it. “And don’t forget to bring the generator back. My dad’ll notice in a few days.”

“I will,” Steve said again, and he meant it more than he’d meant anything in a while.

You raised your hand in a small wave, and Steve had to force himself to turn around, to walk back toward the van where Dustin was probably having seventeen different theories about mission parameters and social dynamics.

When he reached the van and loaded the generator into the back—careful not to jostle it too much, aware that you'd gone to the trouble of unplugging everything and coiling the cords—he couldn't help but glance back at the barn one more time.

You were still there, silhouetted in the doorway, watching to make sure he made it safe. When you saw him looking, you waved again, smaller this time, more intimate somehow. Then you were turning back inside, and the barn door swung shut behind you with a soft creak of old hinges.

Steve stood there for a second longer than necessary, the night settling around him, before placing the generator in the back and climbing into the driver's seat.

Dustin was already tearing into the cake with one of the forks, his eyes rolling back in his head.

“Oh my god,” Dustin said through a mouthful. “Steve, this is incredible.”

“I know,” Steve said, and let the words sit there smugly. It truly was rare that Steve got to be the one who’d actually delivered something instead of just almost screwing it up.

“Who gave this to you? And why?” The questions tumbled out rapid-fire between bites. Dustin looked almost suspicious.

He said your name, and watched a vague recognition fall across Dustin’s face. Steve started the engine, checked the mirrors, tried to ignore the way his heart was still racing. “And—I don’t know. She’s just, she’s nice.”

“She’s more than nice. I think she likes—”

Leave it to Dustin to spin this into a whole conspiracy. In the same breath he thought it, he also thought that maybe it’d been a long time since he or Dustin have been afforded kindness by a stranger, simply for the sake of it.

Still, Steve rolled his eyes, arm stretching out to cover Dustin’s mouth. “Shut up and eat your cake, idiot.”

Dustin slumped back in his seat as he continued eating the cake. Steve thought the interrogation was probably over, but after a minute, Dustin said, “She cute?”

Vey, Steve thought to himself. “Henderson—”

“I’m just asking. It’s a valid question!”

Steve rolled his eyes and didn’t answer, but there was an easiness to Dustin’s chatter he had missed. He hadn’t mentioned the Russian gates or the Upside Down, and was now simply a kid needling him about a girl, the same way a regular kid might needle his babysitter. He supposed he had you to thank for that, too.

“Do you like her?”

“I don’t—I just met her. Like literally just met her.”

“Yeah, and you got cake.”

“She also held a gun at me, so I don’t know.”

Dustin’s brows furrowed, and he acted as if that was the most normal thing ever. In the grand scheme of their predicament, that probably was. “Before or after giving you the cake?”

“Use that smart head of yours and figure it out.”

“Are you gonna return the generator?”

“Mhm.”

“And maybe ask her out?”

Steve’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as he felt his ears grow hot at the idea. “Don’t have time for stuff like that right now.” And that much was true. In between the crawls and the planning for crawls and the downtime he needed after the crawls, there was no way he could pencil in dating. All of his spare moments were spent at the WSQK—actually doing the job—or checking on the kids or helping with surveillance or just trying to stay awake long enough to function. His life wasn’t exactly conducive to dinner and a movie.

But even as he said it, Steve was thinking about the possibility of doing one thing that seemed normal. He would return the generator and the basket to you, though, because he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to see you again.

After one whole week of crawls that lead to only more nightmares and explaining to Hopper that, yes, while the generator does work just fine, but they still need a new one, Steve was able to make it back to the farm. With the generator in tow. He’d managed to squeeze this in between the two hour long gap he received between the closing shift at the WSQK and the meeting in the Wheelers’s basement.

Steve had been planning this for a week. Well, planning was generous. He’d been thinking about it all week while simultaneously trying to be safe during the crawls, dealing with everyone’s increasingly creative forms of expressing anxiety, and fielding approximately seven hundred questions from Dustin about when he was going to return everything.

The answer was now. Finally. It had to be now because if he didn't do it today, he'd lose his nerve entirely.

It was 6:03, and Steve was driving down the same dark road he’d taken a week ago, except this time everything looked different in the early evening light. The fields were gold and green instead of silver and shadow. He could actually see the farm properly now; the white fence posts he’d only just glimpsed, the sprawling fields sectioned into neat squares, the barn that looked even older and more solid in the daylight.

And the flowers. Jesus, so many flowers.

Steve had noticed them at night, had smelt them, but seeing them now was something else entirely. Rows and rows of them stretched out behind the barn, organized by color like it was a rainbow someone had planted in the earth. Even from the road he could see how carefully tended everything was, how much work had gone into making something like this exist.

He pulled up near the barn—the same spot he'd parked a week ago when he'd been trying to steal from you, god, he was an idiot—and killed the engine. His hands were sweating. When was the last time his hands had sweat over a girl? Not since Nancy, probably, and that was a long time ago in Upside-Down-years where time moved so much slower with an active threat looming over everyone.

The basket sat in the passenger seat, and Steve had agonized over it more than he wanted to admit. He couldn’t return it empty, that felt wrong, like he hadn’t appreciated the gesture. He’d spent twenty minutes in the grocery store staring at the grocery section before admitting defeat and moving to the flowers. That felt stupid now, bringing flowers to someone who grew them, and he could see clearly to what extent now. Still, the woman working the floral section convinced him that “everyone likes getting flowers, honey, even people who grow them.”

So now there was a small bouquet of daisies in the basket wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. He’d also written a thank you note, and he wasn’t sure if people did that anymore. He knew for a fact he had never done that.

Steve grabbed the basket, took a breath that didn't settle his nerves at all, and climbed out of the van.

The farm smelled the same as it had that night—like grass and earth and that overwhelming flower sweetness—but warmer now, baked by the sun all day. He could hear chickens somewhere, their soft clucking, and the distant sound of a dog barking. Closer, there was faint music, like someone had a radio on, something folksy with a woman's voice he didn't recognize.

You were in the flower fields about thirty yards out, kneeling between rows of tulips with a pair of garden shears in one hand and a basket—bigger than the one you’d given him, half-full of cut stems—beside you. You were wearing denim overalls, the kind that were slightly too big that they slouched at the shoulders, worn soft and faded from years of washing. Underneath was a white t-shirt, and you had on cream colored work boots that were clearly meant for someone with bigger feet, laces double-knotted, caked with mud at the soles. Your hair was up in a loose ponytail, strands escaping to stick to your neck and frame your face, and even from here, Steve could see the dirt on your knees, your hands, smudged on your cheek where you’d probably pushed your hair back without thinking.

You were humming along to the music, completely absorbed in what you were doing, and Steve felt something in his chest crack open.

A dog noticed him first, a border collie he'd heard barking, black and white with bright eyes, came bounding over with its tail wagging. It was curious and friendly, thank god. It sniffed at Steve's legs, decided he was acceptable, and barked once.

You looked up then.

For a second you just stared, like you couldn't quite process what you were seeing. Then your whole face transformed. Your surprise melted into something that looked like happiness or relief, and you were standing, brushing dirt off your knees and shading your eyes against the sun.

“Harrington?” you called, and even across the distance Steve could hear the smile in your voice.

He’d rehearsed something casual on the drive over—something about the farm, something breezy—and every drafted version evaporated the second your dog barked and you looked up.

“Hey,” he called back as you started walking toward him, the dog trotting at your heels.

As you got closer, Steve could see more details of you. There was a piece of straw caught in the strands of your hair. There was a smudge of something green on your jaw, chlorophyll maybe. Your hands were definitely dirty, palms caked with soil. The overalls had a slight tear in them by the waist. You looked tired but happy, worked-hard but satisfied, and Steve thought he’d never seen someone look so much in their element before that it made him happy for you.

“You came back,” you said, voice filled with a slight surprise, like you thought he genuinely may not come back.

“Yeah. Sorry it took so long.” Steve held up the basket like evidence. “Work’s been crazy.”

“That’s okay.” You stopped a few feet away, and Steve noticed you were a little out of breath from the walk over. “I figured you were busy.” You paused, and something shifted in your expression as you looked at him, eyes flickering down to the basket. “Hey, thanks for bringing it back,” you smiled warmly.

Steve shrugged. “Promised I would,” he said, returning your smile. He held it out to you, hands careful. “There’s—I put something in there. It’s not much. I just—”

You pulled back the strawberry-printed towel and found the daisies wrapped in brown paper. Your breath caught, small and off-guard, like you hadn’t been prepared for it. “Steve.”

“I know. It’s stupid, bringing flowers when you’ve got—” He rubbed the back of his neck, glancing at the fields behind you.

“Mm, it’s not stupid.” You peeled the paper back carefully, the twine still looped loose around your fingers, and brought the daisies up to check them the way he imagined you checked every petal that came into your hands. Then, you cradled them to your chest like they were precious. “These are perfect. I love daisies.”

“Yeah?” Steve felt something in his chest loosen. “Lady at the store says everyone likes getting flowers, but I wasn’t sure—”

“Lady was right.” You brought them to your nose, breathed in, eyes falling shut for just a second. When you looked back at him, the last of the sun was low enough to catch the side of your face, and your smile was so sweet it made his throat lodge “Thank you. Really.”

The dog nudged Steve's hand with her nose, insistent, and he crouched down to scratch behind her ears. She leaned into the touch, tail wagging, and Steve found himself smiling despite the exhaustion pulling at his bones.

“That’s Clover. She likes you,” you observed, voice quiet like he’d passed a test he had no clue about. “She doesn’t usually warm up to people fast.”

“I’m good with dogs, I think,” Steve said. Clover was nosing at his pockets now, snuffling with genuine conviction, like she thought he might have treats hidden somewhere.

“Sorry, girl,” Steve told her. “Fresh out.”

You were still holding the daisies, and Steve noticed you hadn't moved closer or farther away, just stood there at a careful distance like you were trying to figure something out. “Did you bring the generator back too?”

“Yeah. It’s in the van. I can plug it back in where it was, if you want.”

“That’d be great, thank you.” You glanced back toward the flower fields, then at Steve, and something shifted in your expression. “But, do you have time? I don’t want to keep you if you’re needed somewhere.”

Steve checked his watch, the numbers barely visible in the dying light. 6:14. He had until eight.. “I've got time. Almost two hours, actually.”

“Oh.” The relief in your voice was obvious, and Steve had to bite down a smile at that. “Good. That’s good.” You shifted the basket to one hip and seemed to come to some sort of decision. “Have you eaten? Dinner, I mean.”

“I—” Steve tried to remember. He’d had coffee at the station. A bag pretzels from the vending machine at around 4, stale enough to catch in his throat. “Not really.”

“Okay,” you said decisively, like you’d made up your mind about something. “You wanna stay for dinner, then?” Your shoulders pulled into your body slightly, like you were scared to ask the question.

“I’d like that—but I don’t wanna intrude—”

“You can and you will.” You were already walking toward the house, Clover trotting beside you, and Steve found himself following. “We made too much pot roast anyway, and it’s better shared. Plus—” You glanced back over your shoulder, some hair slipping loose with the motion. “You’ve looked tired both times I’ve seen you.”

Steve wanted to argue, but the truth was he was starving, and whatever you were cooking smelled incredible now that he was closer to the house, and the thought of sitting down somewhere that wasn't the station or the bench outside for a quick snack or his empty house felt almost painfully appealing.

“Okay,” he heard himself say. “Okay.”

Your smile widened like you were pleased. “Okay. But first—” You stopped at an outdoor spigot near the back porch, set your basket down, and started washing your hands under the cold water. Dirt and green streaked off your skin, and you scrubbed methodically and thoroughly. “Can’t cook with field hands. My mom would have a fit.”

Steve watched you wash, watched the water run clear over your wrists and between your fingers, and felt something settle in his chest. This was real. This was normal. Standing in someone's backyard on a Wednesday evening, watching them wash dirt off their hands before dinner. No monsters, no conspiracies, no life-or-death missions. Just a girl and a farm and the promise of pot roast. It felt almost unreal and also exactly like what he’d imagined his life to look like before Barb went missing in the woods.

“Here.” You turned off the spigot and patted your hands dry using one of the five clothes in the basket on the ground, water droplets catching the light. “You probably got dust on them from the generator. Want to wash up?”

Steve looked down at his hands and found you were right; there was some grime under his nails, grease smudged on his palm from checking the van's oil that morning. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Steve stopped needing excuses somewhere around the second week. He’d gone to the crawl right after helping you with making dinner and eating it on two small stools outside feeling giddy, despite the fact that he was on his way to the Upside Down. It was a strange feeling, and he’d tried—truly had—to get it through his thick skull that he had no reason to create another responsibility for himself, at least not when the tunnels kept swallowing more of him each time and returning less of him back. How could he, when you felt so little like a responsibility, and so much like the few unbroken hours in a week built entirely out of triage?

His van had started going for the turnoff, giving way to the softer hush of the farm’s drive-up. He’d stopped rehearsing reasons to come, and simply came. He’d started noticing how you hummed off-key on purpose, he was almost certain, testing whether he’d bother to notice. You’d never leave a row half-cut, not for food, not for thunder, not, he suspected, for much short of anything short of the actual apocalypse. Given his life lately, the latter felt less like hyperbole and more like a real caveat. Your father called you ‘sweet pea’ and Steve noticed how the man always said it so quietly, like affection embarrased him more than it embarrased you, and you would always pretend not to catch it.

Steve had become content with sitting the few hours in his week pretending he wasn’t putting his life on the line all the time he wasn’t in those few hours. He’d arrive some evenings straight off a crawl, knuckles split, a smell clinging to the back of his throat that he could only describe as wrong, and something about the promise of you would work on him like a torniquet works on a wound.

Some evenings, the light would come in low and buttered through the kitchen window while you stood at the counter doing something with your hands and for one entire second Steve had started to think you looked more like something a much older painting would’ve made an altarpiece of. He never said any of this out loud. He knew that whatever was beneath the ground only illuminated you further above ground, but he was fairly certain that if he’d met you in some other version of his life, he would’ve looked at you twice just the same. The tunnels had only handed him eyes that were able to notice.

He’d come even when he shouldn’t have come. Tonight, the sky was the color of a healing bruise all afternoon—sick yellow-gray bleeding into a deeper, angrier purple on the edges—and by the time he’d pulled in, the first fat raindrops were already smacking the windshield. He’d told himself that he should’ve turned around two miles back, for this was far from the night he should’ve been visiting a farm.

You met him at the door already laughing, hair scraped back, sleeves shoved to the elbow like you’d been in the middle of something. You were always in the middle of something. You hauled him in by the sleeve, and water sheeted off his jacket onto your floorboards. Your father made a discontended hum from the couch in the living room, watching him drip like a retriever.

“Evening, sir,” Steve said, which came out considerably more dignified than what he looked.

Your father grunted; it could’ve been an indictment or a greeting. Steve learned it was hard to tell with him. “Storm’s meant to get worse before it gets better,” he said, flipping a page. “Hope you brought a change of clothes, kid.”

“I—no, sir. Didn’t think that far ahead.”

“Clearly.” Steve could’ve sworn he’d faintly smiled before he vanished back to his newsprint. “Her brother’s got shirts in the room behind the kitchen. Take one before you catch your death.”

You were already pulling Steve in as he tried to figure out whether that had been permission or a threat, laughing under your breath.

You dragged Steve up to a little room behind the kitchen. It was a little bigger than a closet, low-ceilinged, and lined with shelves that had been through what he could only assume was water damage. Zinc buckets sat stacked along one side of the wall, a few still half-full of stems soaking, and a single bare bulb hung overhead.

You flipped the light on properly and started rifling through a shelf of folded fabric before tossing him a flannel. He caught it at his chest.

“I told you not to bother with coming when it’s so bad out,” you said, already focusing on something else as you turned to give him the illusion of privacy.

He peeled off his soaked shirt. “You told me not to bother with bringing flowers every time I come,” he murmured, using the towel to wipe down his arms and torso. “I can still bother with you.” He finished putting on the flannel in the silence you gave him. “Alright. I’m decent now.”

When you’d told Steve about the farmer’s market over a dinner, Steve had wanted badly to go see you there. It felt like the closest way to get a piece of the version of you that existed outside his orbit. He wanted to see how you were like outside the farm and then, greedily, wanted to be let in anyway.

He made the mistake of mentioning it to Robin.

“Alright, when are we going?”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Steve said dumbly. “I’m going by myself.”

“Excuse me?” Robin set down the reel of tape she’d been threading, and Steve watched as something wounded flickered behind her affronted tone. “There is an entire girl, apparently. And that’s where you’ve been disappearing to for—how long’s it been?”

Steve didn’t bother dignifying that with a response, so she added, “I had to hear about her secondhand from Henderson. I’m your best friend, Steve.”

Steve’s eyes widened as he shook his head at her. That much was true. Dustin was a blabbermouth if not anything else. That, paired with his deduction skills—Steve’s not going home, Steve looks happier, Steve met a girl that night—had him piecing it faster than Steve had pieced his own feelings on the matter, which, admittedly, wasn’t saying much these days.

“You’re crazy. You’re guilting me into this.” But he didn’t bother arguing any further. If he was honest—if he let himself sit in it for a second, past the nerves—he wanted Robin there, so he could have proof that the two halves of his life could exist in the same space without collapsing.

Selfishly, in the same feeling, he’d wanted to keep you away from anything else that was involved with the Upside Down. He thought he was already an unwelcome addition into your life, something that had shown up with a guilty conscience and never left. He didn’t want you anywhere near the rest of it.

Still, the boyish part of him wanted to have that normalcy of letting his best friend meet the girl he’s been growing sweet on, the way anyone else his age got to do it.

He figured he could have that much at least.

Saturday arrived and it was a late-summer sort of morning where he wasn’t sure if it was going to rain. The gravel lot behind the church was already filling with the hum of people completing their errands early in the morning. Steve caught the smell of your stall before he caught sight of it; it was easy after spending so much time around your work. It was sweeter and more concentrated here than it ever got out on the fields, like you’d specifically put the whole month and distilled it down to your stall.

Robin walked beside him, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, scanning the stalls. “Do you think she’ll like me?”

“God, I hope not,” Steve muttered, eyes finally landing on you.

You were mid-conversation with an older woman, wrapping something purple and spiky in brown paper, laughing at whatever the woman had said. Your hair was pulled back, a canvas apron dusted with dirt-colored smudges worked into the fabric like a permanant second pattern, and there was a chalkboard sign propped against the table in your looping, almost-cursive handwriting that said ‘DAHLIAS - $4/BUNCH, ASK ABOUT WEDDING ORDERS.’

Steve stopped walking and Robin ran into his shoulder.

“Oh.” Robin’s voice went soft, almost reverant, taking in the whole scene of the buckets of flowers sorted by color, the chalkboard sign, you. “Okay. Yup.”

He didn’t get to ask what she meant by that because right then, you looked up and found him across two rows of tomato stands. Your whole face shifted, surprised that got immediately elbowed out of the way by something warmer, something that had stopped being surprising weeks ago but clearly hadn’t stopped being nice.

“Hey.” You came around the table, wiping your hands on your apron, a little breathless. “You came.”

“Said I would.”

“You say a lot of things,” you said, a little fondly, he noted. Your eyes slid past him to Robin, who’d tucked herself behind Steve and was choosing to look at you over his shoulder. “Hi.”

“Hi!” Robin came around and stuck her hand out, entirely too bright. “Robin. I already know a lot about you, and you know nothing about me. So, we’re starting this friendship at a real power imbalance.”

You laughed and shook her hand. “Nice to meet you too, I think.”

Steve embarrasingly jutted a thumb in Robin’s direction as he looked at you. “She’s exaggerating.”

“I’m gonna go look at the—” Robin started backing away, eyes catching on something a few stalls down. Or maybe she was pretending. Steve really had no idea anymore. “—that. I’m gonna look at it.” She turned away, weaving through the crowd after her tactless way of showing she wanted to leave Steve with you for some unsupervised minutes.

You watched her go, slightly amused. “What’s she heard about me?”

“Not much,” he said, distracted as he reached out to pluck a stray leaf caught in your hair, a habit he’d built without noticing. “You’ve got—there we go.”

“Thank you.” You tipped your head slightly into the motion of his hands, an unconscious lean. “Big Saturday. We sold out of peonies before nine.”

“Yeah? None left for me?” Steve leaned his hip against the edge of the table, in no hurry now that he’d gotten here, watching you refold a stack of brown paper.

“For you, I could probably find something.” You set the paper down and crouched behind the table, rummaging through a bucket tucked in the shade where the good stems went to survive the heat, and came back up with a single peony, slightly bruised at the edge of one petal, clearly a reject you’d pulled aside rather than sold. “This one didn’t make the cut.”

“I’ll take the reject.” Steve turned it over in his hand, admiring the sheer size of it and the way the petals crowded in on each other. “It’s on-brand for me.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” you said, smiling, and you reached over to swipe a thumb along his jaw before he could ask why. Your fingers lingered at the corner of a fading bruise near his temple, one he’d forgotten was still visible. “Steve.”

“That’s from last week,” he said before you could ask.

“It’s still healing weird. You should ice it.”

“I did.”

“For, like, five minutes probably.” You crossed your arms over your chest, a knowing look on your face. “Gonna tell me what happened, or should I guess?”

“Ran into a door.”

“Good one.”

He caught your hand before you could drop it away to hold it against his jaw for a second longer than the moment strictly called for, feeling the roughness of your palm against his skin, the small calluses from shears and soil that had become as familiar to him as anything about you. “M’fine. Promise.”

He could see the want to push further sitting right behind your eyes, the same quiet worry you’d been giving him since the first time you met him—only intensified now—whenever something reminded you that his life held pieces you weren’t allowed to see. You just exhaled, letting it go.

“Just—be more careful around doors.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tongue coming out just an inch to run over his bottom lip, and watched your eyes focus on everything behind him rather than him, satisfaction curling warm in him at how easy it had become to fluster you. Then, he clicked his tongue, digging for his wallet to bring out a few dollar bills. “Here.” He held out a couple bills, and you started at him like he’d offered you something offensive. “For the peony?” he clarified.

“It’s a reject, Steve, it’s basically garbage. I’m not taking your money for garbage.” You pushed his hand back toward him firmly, and he let you, mostly because he didn’t really like the idea of arguing with you, especially not over two dollars. “Put your money away before I start charging you for the ones you cut, too. Might as well, considering how many you destroyed over the summer.”

“You should,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest, then slipped the bills under a basket anyway when your attention snagged away.

Robin appeared again, holding a cone of kettle corn the size of her head. “Okay, I bought kettle corn, looked at gourds, and made eye contact with a goat.”

“How’s the kettle corn?” you asked, shifting your attention toward her, resting your palms on the table.

“Life-changing.” She held out the cone to you as an offer, and you plucked a few pieces with a small, grateful sound, popping them into your mouth without breaking stride from tidying the buckets in front of you.

“This is good. They usually run out by ten,” you agreed, and gestured vaguely toward the stand. “Get in line early next time or it’s slim pickings.”

“That’s useful to know. We’ll come earlier next time.” Robin nodded, chewing along with you, and for a second the two of you simply stood there in silence, sharing the food like you’d known each other longer than five minutes, while Steve leaned against the table with a flurry of uninvited, completely optimistic thoughts swarming his mind.

“This is an interesting sight.”

Steve almost dropped the garden scissors to the ground and jumped up at the voice.

A guy was standing at the edge of the flower field, hands shoved in the pockets of a faded hoodie, work boots caked with mud that looked newer than the rest of him. He was tall—taller than Steve, maybe six-two—and Steve recognized him almost immediately, even after years. Miles, your older brother, Steve assumed, who’d been a senior when Steve was a sophomore, offensive lineman who’d protected the quarterback without much Hawkins fanfare or glory.

He wasn’t someone Steve had really known, just someone he’d existed alongside in his previous ecosystem of Hawkins High social hierarchies.

“Harrington,” Miles said, blowing out a breath as he confirmed what he was trying to figure out.

“Hey.” Steve stood up slowly, brushing dirt off his jeans. The shears felt stupid in his hand now, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. “I was—she asked me to—”

“To cut her flowers?” Miles’s expression was unreadable aside from the quirk of his left brow, like he was amused. “That’s real charitable.”

“It’s not—” Steve stopped, unsure how to explain what this was, how he’d started showing up at the farm once, then twice, then somehow it had become a regular thing over the past few weeks. You’d mentioned off-hand that you were running behind on cutting because something in the air had made the dahlias and sunflowers bloom all at once, and Steve had continued to offer to help after his shifts. “She’s got a lot to do, and I had some time.”

Miles nodded slowly, studying Steve in a way that made it clear he was catching up on him in every way possible.

“You work at the radio station?” Miles asked, gesturing down to the WSQK shirt Steve was wearing.

“Yeah. Production stuff, mainly. Editing, running board.” Steve set the shears down carefully in the basket, suddenly very aware. “Been there for a while.”

“You played basketball, right? Point guard?”

“Yeah.” Steve was surprised he remembered. They’d barely overlapped, and Miles had been football through and through. “You were—offensive line?”

“Left tackle.” Miles pulled one hand out of his pocket to gesture vaguely at his own frame. He stepped into the row then, careful of the flowers in a way that surprised Steve; he’d either been taught to be or had been yelled at enough times that it stuck. “Didn’t take you for the type to stick around Hawkins. Everyone figured you’d be somewhere with a real team.”

There was no accusation in the words, but Steve felt himself gulp nervously.

“Things changed,” he said.

“Yeah.” Miles crouched a few feet away, picked up a fallen dahlia head that had snapped off its stem and turned it over his fingers.

There was a silence that felt almost uneasy. Steve went back to cutting, mostly to have something to do with his hands. He’d gotten better at it over the past few weeks; you’d been showing him where to cut, how the angle mattered, and how to leave enough stem that the plant kept on giving. His first few attempts had been something close to butchery; now his pile looked almost neat.

Miles watched him for a moment. “She teach you that?”

“Yeah. Took her a couple tries.” Steve clipped another stem. “I killed a whole row the first time. Cut too low.”

Something close to a laugh moved through Miles’s nose. “She cried when I mowed over her marigolds when she was nine. I was thirteen, didn’t know they were hers, thought it was just the edge of the lawn.” He set the broken dahlia down gently, almost without thinking about it. “Cried for a week straight. My mom made me replant the whole bed by hand to make it up to her.”

Miles let out a short sigh then. “She’s better about it now.” He tilted his head toward the far end of the field where the rows looked thinner, newer, and the soil darker like it’d been turned recently. “She’s been rebuilding those back beds since spring. The quake took the whole back third. Split the ground right down the middle of her best stuff. Bulbs she’d been growing for years, just—gone.”

Most people talked about the earthquake that way. Bad luck. An act of god. A thing that happened to you, like hail or transmission. The earth opened up and that was that.

Steve’s hands went still on the shears. He knew what had opened up the ground, down to his bones. He knew the smell of it, the cold wrong air that came up through the gates, the way the maps Hopper kept tacking to the cabin wall had a red line running right out toward the edge of town, toward the farms, toward here. He’d seen photographs of the fissures, he just hadn’t thought about whose land sat over the worst of it, whose years of work got swallowed when the thing he was supposed to be stopping reached up out of the dark and took it.

Steve had been crawling through tunnels for months chasing the source of it, and the whole time, you’d been putting back what was stolen, calling it an earthquake because that’s what they’d made you believe.

You came around the side of the barn before Steve could respond to Miles, and the timing was almost a mercy.

You had a watering can in one hand and a dish towel thrown over your shoulder; you’d changed at some point since the morning—out of overalls, into a sundress with a cardigan that definitely belonged to someone older, sleeves pushed up to your elbows. You spotted the two of them and your brows knitted together as your whole face moved into a complicated thing; pleased to see Steve and suspicious of your brother.

“What are you doing out here?” you said, eyes narrowed in Miles’s direction.

“Talkin’ to your boyfriend,” Miles said mildly, pushing himself to stand up.

“He’s not—” You went a little flustered, and Steve felt his own ears go hot, and neither of you finished the sentence. “Don’t you have a tractor to work on?”

“Tractor’s good.”

“Dad said it’s been making a weird sound.”

“Dad thinks you talking is a weird sound.” But Miles was already moving, brushing past you. He paused just long enough to pluck the dish towel off your shoulder and drop it onto your head. You swatted him without any real heat, and he ducked out of range.

For a second, Steve watched the two of you with this unnameable dull ache of standing on the outside of something that came easy to other people.

“Harrington.” Miles glanced back over his shoulder at Steve this time. “Fix your grip on those shears. You’re embarrassing her.”

“He is not,” you called after your brother, but he was gone around the barn. You pulled the towel off your head and rolled “Ignore him. He thinks he’s hilarious.”

Steve shrugged. “He’s a little funny.”

You crouched into the row beside him, setting the watering can down in the dirt. Your knee knocked his where there wasn't quite room for the both of you between the dahlias. You didn't move it. Neither did he. “He didn’t say anything stupid, did he?”

Steve thought about the marigolds. The shoebox of receipts nobody would honor. The thin dark rows at the back of the field where you'd been putting the world back together by hand since spring.

“Nah,” he said. “Just brother stuff.”

You hummed, clearly far from convinced, as you pulled your bottom lip between your teeth. But you let it go. You picked up the shears he’d abandoned, crouching down beside him, and turned them over. You held it out to him handle-first.

He took them and made a cut, and you leaned in close enough that he could smell the sun on you, watching his hands the way he’d watched yours the first afternoon. Steve found that his fingers weren’t quite as steady as they’d been a minute ago.

“Wait,” you murmured. You reached over and slid his hand down the handle, your fingers warm against his knuckles. It was so mechanical, so pragmatic, that Steve felt almost silly for the way his pulse had picked up. “There. Now you’ve got some leverage.”

You smiled at him, turning your neck slightly as you did so, and it started at one corner and took a second getting to the other. Steve had the even more unhelpful thought that he could probably map out the exact movement of it by now, knew it would pull a small crease into your left cheek before it touched your right.

He made himself look at the dahlias and tried the cut again, your hand still loosely bracketing his. You were guiding him now more than gripping. The stem gave clean this time, no ragged tear, no crushed pith. You made a small, delightedly pleased sound in your throat like you would when you’d taught a dog to sit.

“See,” you said. “Not so hard.”

He felt his own lips pick up at that. “Got a great teacher.”

“Well.” You sat back on your heels. “We'll make a farmer out of you yet, Harrington.”

“God, I hope not.”

Steve wasn’t sure if you knew that he kept washing up here more than any reasonable excuse required. He wasn’t going to be the one to tell you. Though, he was sure you already knew. From what he’d learned of you in the hours doing handiwork and talking that somehow stacked up, you were smart. You just chose, with what he considered to be very thought-out grace, what to let alone.

A bee had gotten drunk on one of the heads a few feet down, weaving in slow, dumb loops. He watched you pause to watch it with the same patient attention you seemed to give most things. He had the unglamorous vertigo of noticing that he could probably spend a very long time watching you just watch things. And another that he’d very much like to.

The sun had dropped low enough to hit the row sideways instead of from overhead, and it turned the whole bed molten at the edges. He checked his watch before he could stop himself, then blew out a short breath as he read the time.

Your head turned slightly. “You have to go?”

“No,” Steve said, lied. Sucking in a sharp breath through his nose, he added, slower, because he didn’t want to lie to you and didn’t want to leave either, “Not yet. I’ve got a—I have to run for something for a friend in a bit. Pick something up.” He turned the shears over in his hand. “But not yet.”

You pressed your lips together, and he could see you try to bite down a smile. “Always so cryptic,” you murmured.

“You want to come?”

Your brows furrowed as you blinked. “Come where?”

“On the errand. It’s—” He shrugged, going for casual and missing it completely. “It’s nothing. It’s like a twenty-minute drive but I figured—don’t know. You’ve been out here for so long. Might be nice for us to go someplace else.”

You looked at him for a long moment, long enough that he felt his own breath pick up at the sudden, ridiculous fear that he may have overstepped, that he’d misread the past month of baked goods and farm-work completely. But then, you glanced down at yourself, turning over your hand to inspect your fingernails, and said, “Let me just wash my hands quickly.”

You’d folded yourself up into the passenger seat with your knees up, the cardigan pulled over your hands, watching the farm mirror shrink in the side mirror until the road swallowed it. Steve drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the gearshift.

“You can change it,” he said, nodding at the radio, which was murmuring something classic-rock at a low volume. “I won’t be offended.”

“I like hearing what you listen to,” you said simply, and Steve saw you shrug from the corner of his eye. “Tells me about you.”

“Oh, yeah?” He let out a short chuckle. “Then I guess I’ve gotta listen to what you listen to someday. Learn more about you.”

“It’s mostly my mom’s records,” you admitted. “Patsy Cline. Some Fleetwood Mac.” You tucked your knees up higher, resting your chin on them. “Nothing you’d probably play at your radio station.”

“I’d play it.” Steve meant it more than the offhand way he said it. “We get, like, four requests a week. Two of them are some divorced guy dedicating something bitter to his ex. I’d take what you like over that any day.”

You laughed—a surprised lilt woven in it—and Steve felt the sound in his chest. The road unspooled ahead, flat and endless yet somehow still beautiful, cornfields giving way to soybean giving way to more corn, everything gone the color of scorched match. Steve had driven this stretch a hundred times without seeing it, had spent years driving it with his eyes locked on something past the windshield. It felt different with you beside him. Slower, somehow, even though the speedometer said otherwise.

“Can I ask you something?” you said.

“That’s never a good start.”

You ignored that. “Did you always want to stay? In Hawkins?”

He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “No. My dad had this big plan for where I was supposed to end up.” He shrugged stiffly. “I was supposed to get out. Everyone kind of figured I would.”

“What happened?”

The world cracked open, essentially, but he couldn’t tell you that. He hated how much of it he couldn’t tell you. He knew he wouldn’t have wanted to tell you, anyway, but hated there was no option to do so. “Stuff happened,” he said instead, vaguely. “Ended up here. Doin’ pretty decently.”

“Do you wish you’d left?”

“What’s with the interrogation?” He huffed out a short breath, something close to a laugh as his eyes flickered to you. And because it felt wrong to leave your question unanswered, he said, “I used to.” His fingers tapped once on the gearshift. “Lately, not so much.”

He could feel you go still beside him.

“What about you?” he asked, mostly to give the moment somewhere to go. “You ever want out?”

You were quiet for a second, watching the fields slide by, and Steve found himself looking at the reflection of you in the window glass instead of the window itself, the ghost-version of your face laid faint over the outside, translucent and doubled.

“Sometimes. I wanted to go somewhere with mountains.” You tucked a strand of your hair back that the window crack kept working loose. “Then my mom got sick, and we wanted to be here. And then it was just—easier to stay. And then I started working on the tulips, and you know when you build something for long enough you can’t really picture leaving it? Feels like walking out on a kid.”

Steve nodded slowly. He wondered if you were aware of what you’d done with the fields, raising it back from the dead and the rupture that had broken apart the town.

He also thought he would have liked to take you to the mountains when this was all said and done, if he made it out. He’d probably forget to check the oil. He imagined you’d want to stop at every single roadside stand between here and wherever the land stopped being flat, looking at what grew where, comparing a stranger’s dahlias to your own with the little competitive squint you got whenever another stall’s stuff looked a little too good.

He thought about whether Clover would do good in a van for that long. Would Steve have to stop every hour so she could piss on somebody’s fence post? Would you let her ride up front with her head out the window the whole way?

“Like two peas in a pod,” he murmured. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you stayed.”

It was a whole lot of wanting with a girl who probably had no idea she was already lodged somewhere permanent in him. He hadn’t told you any of it because he found nothing about the way he thought, translated into words, would come out like anything but unhinged.

“Yeah?”

“Obviously.” His hand came off the gearshift to press a light touch to your shoulder. “Turns out I’m partial to farms now.”

“Just farms in general?”

“Nah. A very specific one.” He pulled his hand back to the gearshift before it could linger somewhere it had no business lingering, though the warmth of your palm seemed to stay printed on his palm a second longer than physics probably allowed. “Don’t get used to me being sappy, though.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone,” you said, mouth curving. “Though I might start expecting this.”

“Only if you keep letting me bother you. I’ve gotta stay motivated somehow.”

“That’s what you are,” you said teasingly, fond.

The radio continued to hum. He wondered whether the mountains you’d wanted as a kid looked anything like the ones he’d overheard El describe to Mike once, blue and folded and endless. He was thinking about that when the walkie went off in the cupholder and his whole body stiffened up.

It cracked to life mid-static, and Robin’s voice punched out, “Steve. Harringtoooon.” He looked over at you for a second, eyeing the walkie. “You there? Pick up.”

His hand was already moving to it, his knuckles going pale on the wheel with the other. “Yup. Here.”

“Jonathan had to do something. Can you come earlier—?”

“No—” he started saying immediately, shaking his head. “I’m not supposed to be doing—” He stopped himself. He knew he’d say too much in front of you trying to argue his way out.

“We gotta be out there before—”

“Yeah. Okay,” he bit out, because he could already figure out the rest of it. Context clues and such. It had also happened too many times that he didn’t need the entire schpiel—Steve was the one that was meant to be available. “I’m finishing something. Twenty minutes.”

“We don’t have twenty—”

“Yes, we do.” The words came out harsher than he’d intended, harsher than he’d wanted to be in front of you. He’d have to apologize to Robin first thing. “I’ll be there. In twenty minutes.”

“Fine. Twenty.”

“Yeah.” Steve set the walkie back down, face-first, the little plastic click of it landing in the cup holder, a sound that sounded enormous in the silence that followed.

He didn’t turn to face you right away, doing the entire calculation of the minutes in his head. Steve—frankly—did not want to go. He wanted to keep driving toward the errand that barely existed anymore, some ten minutes to keep you in the passenger seat a little longer. He wanted the twenty minutes the Party had eaten alive to belong to him instead. He wanted, absurdly, to turn the van around and go back to your little dahlias and just keep cutting them until there was nothing left to cut, until the whole field was empty and there was no reason to leave.

You’d turned to the window, like you were making space for his conversation and his thoughts. The little courtesy made Steve’s chest tighten.

The strand of hair had come loose again, right on cue, the window crack tugging it free. This time, before he could stop himself, Steve reached over and tucked it behind your ear. You went still, and he let his fingers stay there a second too long, grazing the shell of your ear and the warm skin beneath. He felt the whole touch-and-retreat instinct he’d been running all day just stop. He let himself have it, the one soft thing he could actually give you, wordless, instead of the thirty apologies stacked up between his teeth he didn’t even have the minutes to fucking spill.

“I’m sorry,” he tried anyway, voice dipping lower. His hand finally dropped to his lap, running out of plausible reasons to stay. “I’ll drop you home. I didn’t expect—”

“Don’t apologize,” you said, voice gentle. Somehow, that made him feel it more, not less. “I know you get busy.”

“I know. I just—” He exhaled, hands finding the wheel again, gripping it a little too hard as he turned to go back. “I wanted today to just be—today. Not interrupted by anything.”

You were quiet a second, and then you said, “Why?”

He knew it was coming. He hadn’t very well expected that you’d let his unreasonable pull go unnoticed.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Guess I don’t like it when this—whatever it is—gets cut short.” His jaw worked. “Don’t like sharing the good parts of my week with—with the other stuff.”

Because you’re the only thing that asks nothing of me except to be there with you and do mundane little things; because everyone else needs me to survive something and you just need me to show up.

He glanced over quickly to check your face, trying to read if his answer had told you what he needed it to tell you. You were smiling softly, and it seemed like you’d put on that expression just for him, just so he wouldn’t get so worked up. It almost worked.

“Well, we did have today,” you said. “Mostly.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he said, and meant it so much his voice went rough as he said it. “All of it.”

“Okay,” you said, and Steve felt the tightness in his chest loosen just a fraction. “I’ll hold you to it.”

He needed you to hold him to it. God, he needed you to hold him to it because he had no idea how many more of these he could get, and he wanted every single good one to be yours.

Steve knew you probably hadn’t expected this when he said he’d make up for it, but after the crawl, after the tunnel had gone on twice as long as it should’ve, after Nancy’s flashlight had died and they’d had to feel their way back along the wall, after Hopper’s face when they finally surfaced, furious with relief, after all of it, Steve had found himself driving toward the farm instead of home. His hands had done it for him, muscle memory laying out the route before his brain could think to check the time, the same way they’d turned him onto your road for a month running now without him having to think about it.

It was well past midnight now. There was no moon worth mentioning, just the van’s headlights carving a narrow tunnel through all that darkness until he cut a quarter mile out.

He had no idea what he looked like. He could guess. He knew his knuckles were split from something he couldn’t fully remember hitting, knew there was a long smear of dirt and worse down one side of his jaw. He knew his shirt had a tear at the shoulder seam. He didn’t care enough to stop and turn around and go home and clean up like any person with half a working braincell would. Some raw, unedited part of him just needed to see that you were real and unhurt and still exactly where he’d left you, and every mile he didn’t drive felt like a mile spent like lying.

Your window was on the second floor, the one with the gauzy curtain that he’d learned never closed all the way, and Steve stood beneath it in the wet grass feeling monumentally stupid—a grown man about to lob pebbles at glass like this was ‘62—until he spotted the trellis instead, sturdy-looking, laced with something climbing and thorny that he knew he was going to regret grabbing.

He regretted it immediately, and then again on the second rung, splinters biting into his palm on top of everything else the night had already taken out of his hands. But he got high enough to knock, three soft raps against the pane, low enough that it wouldn’t wake your brother or father. He just waited, heart going childishly stupid and fast in his chest.

The curtain moved almost immediately, and he wondered if you hadn’t been asleep at all.

Your face appeared in the gap, your confused face slipping sharper the second the porch light down below caught the state of him. Steve watched you register his entire person before the window slid up.

“Steve—”

“I know it’s late,” he said, voice gruff. “I know I probably look—I just wanted to see you. That’s it—”

“Get in here before you fall and break your neck,” you said through a harsh whisper, already reaching for him.

You hooked a hand under his arm, and Steve let himself, embarrasingly, gracelessly, be hauled over the sill, knee banging into the frame. He landed half on the floor and half against your dresser.

“Hi,” he breathed out, trying to force out a smile.

You pressed your lips together, eyeing him now in the new light. He watched a crease form between your brows, and he could practically hear the gears of your brain turning at his state. “Were you playing in the dirt or something?” you muttered, and there was worry laced under the dryness of your words.

“Or something.” Steve laughed breathily. “Long night.”

“Looks like it.” You crossed to your nightstand, and Steve’s eyes shamelessly tracked you in the low gold wash of the lamp you clicked on. Your hair was loose from whatever you’d twisted it in, an old t-shirt that swallowed you down past the middle of your thighs.

You disappeared behind the door, and the second you did, Steve said, “Come back.” He hated how much it sounded like begging, how little he cared.

“Getting a washcloth, not moving to another state, Steve.” You sounded warm and amused. Steve heard the water run, a cabinet creak open and shut.

He sat there on the floor, half-slumped against your dresser, listening to the tiny sounds of you moving around for his sake.

You reappared a moment later, a chipped bowl of water balanced against your hip, a washcloth draped over your shoulder like you kept one permanantly stocked for idiots like him. You nudged him with your foot until he got the hint and hauled himself onto the edge of the bed, and stood in front of him, between his knees, without being asked, setting the bowl on the nightstand.

“Hey,” he said again, rearing his head back slightly and tilting his neck to look up at you.

He saw you bite back a smile, the one that started on one side and took its sweet time getting to the other.

“You’re ridiculous.” You reached for the washcloth at your shoulder, wrung it once over the bowl, and the water made a small sound. “Head up.”

He tipped his chin obediently, and you leaned in to start at his jaw, the cloth cool and startling against a graze he hadn’t felt until it stung. He hissed through his teeth and you murmured a soft apology without slowing down, your other hand coming up to brace against his shoulder for balance.

There were sleep-worn creases at the corner of your eyes. His nose filled with the faint clove-and-vanilla smell of whatever you washed your hair with, warmer now, like the nighttime had made it easier for it to settle into your strands. The old t-shirt slid loose at your collarbone everytime you shifted your weight, giving him glimpses he was trying, with limited success, not to notice too hard.

“You don’t have to do this,” he murmured.

“I do.” You let out a short laugh and pressed the rag lightly against his face, almost affectionately. “Why else would you have come here?”

His lips pushed out at the words, because that wasn’t true. He needed proof that you were here more than he needed sleep or food or being patched up. “Figured you’d miss me if I didn’t show.”

You tugged your bottom lip between your teeth again, and Steve let his fingers absentmindedly go up to catch your chin, tugging it back down. He let it linger there, and you said, with his fingertip against your chin, “I think you’re the one who missed me.”

“Yeah,” he admitted, no fight left in him to deny it. Through an exhale, he added, “I did.”

The rag went paused against his jaw, forgotten between your fingers. You smiled, the corners of your eyes creased. “That’s a big admission for you, Steve Harrington.”

“Uh-huh, I know,” he said, ducking his head underneath to meet your eyes properly. “Your turn now.”

You thought about it, lips going from one side to the other, deliberating. “I was hoping you’d come by tomorrow.”

“Yeah?” Steve smiled, even though his lip stung. “Were you looking forward to it?”

“If I was?”

“Then I’d say we’re pretty even.” Steve’s thumb found the edge of your jaw, tracing the same path you’d left on him with the rag, no purpose to it beyond wanting to just touch you. “Both of us just standin’ around missing each other.”

“I think it’s productive,” you said, voice softening into something dimmer at the edges, matching his. You tipped into his touch just slightly.

He cleared his throat, pinching his eyes shut for a second before opening them back up to meet you again.

“Since we’re doing big admissions,” he murmured, “I wanna kiss you.”

Your eyes dropped to his mouth—to the split at his lip, the dried smear of blood—and you reached for the rag again.

“Hold still,” you said, voice barely even a whisper.

He hummed in confusion, slightly caught off-guard, but he held still. You brought the cloth up slowly, and this time there was none of that quickness from a few minutes ago. Your thumb braced at his jaw as you moved the damp fabric precisely over him, clearing the residue of the night off him.

His eyes were trained on you as you did it. He watched the small furrow of your brows, the way your eyes tracked your own hand instead of his, focused entirely on the task.

“There,” you said quietly, setting the rag down. Your thumb lingered at the corner of his mouth, smoothing over where the cloth had just been. “Okay.”

“Yeah?” he breathed out.

“Mhm.” You met his eyes, and whatever nerves had been sitting in your voice a second ago settled into something steadier. “You can kiss me now.”

Steve really didn’t need to be told twice, for he leaned in, careful, mindful of the tenderness you’d just tended to, and closed the distance between your lips slowly.

You made a small sound against his mouth, surprised more than anything even though you knew exactly what was happening, and his hand came up to curl around your waist, fingers finding the cotton of your t-shirt and, underneath it, the real warmth of you, true in a way nothing tonight—or in the past few months—had managed to be.

You shifted closer, the bowl of water wobbled dangerously on the nightstand and neither of you cared. For a second, the whole night—the coldness of the Upside Down—just fell away, replaced entirely by the fact of your mouth against his and your hands fisting loose in the front of his ruined shirt.

He kissed you slower than he’d ever kissed anyone. He kissed you slower than his own want was telling him to, because he understood that this was the last thing he should be rushing, especially not after a night that had tried, in its vicious way, to take him somewhere he might not have come back from.

Steve wanted to feel all of it, and he did; the slight catch of your breath, the way your fingers eventually uncurled from his shirt to slide up into his hair instead, nails grazing against his scalp causing a low noise to slip out of his own throat.

You pulled back only far enough to breathe, foreheads resting together, and Steve kept his eyes closed for a second as he realized he couldn’t fight the dumb smile off his face. Your uneven breath billowed softly against his temple.

He fluttered his eyes open, eyeing you. “Now you look like you went and played in the dirt, too.”

You laughed, a little breathless, and said, “It’s all your fault.”

“Completely my fault,” Steve agreed. “I take full responsibility.”

He tugged at your waist to pull you down, breaking your awkward stance of leaning your neck down. You came easily, knees hitting the mattress on either side of him before you settled properly in his lap, some careful shifting that ended with your hands braced on his shoulders and his own arms banded loose around your middle.

For a while, you two simply moved in the newfound rhythm. His mouth found the hinge of your jaw, and you tipped your head to give him more access to it. When his lips grazed the soft skin just beneath your ear, your breath audibly snagged. You tried to cover it up by a huff of laughter, embarrased by your own reaction, and Steve let his stubble drag against your jaw on the next pass.

Your hand migrated to the back of his neck and started tracing slow, absent-minded figures against his skin, your fingers restlessly wandering while the rest of you sat still and let him work. Every few seconds the movement would stop entirely, your whole hand pressing flat against his skin, like you’d forgotten it existed until his mouth did something that reminded you of it.

You curved into him slowly, knees shifting closer on the mattress, your spine losing its uprightness, and the whole of you tilted toward him like a plant did to an open window. Steve’s arm tightened again around your waist, giving you his solidness to lean into.

Steve hummed when your fingernails raked against the nape of his neck. “So nice,” he muttered, voice going loose.

“Yeah?” You pulled back just far enough to look at him, a smug thing tugging at the corner of your mouth.

“Don’t let it get to that pretty little head.”

His palm pointedly reached up from your waist to cup the back of your skull, pushing it down slightly so you could meet his mouth again.

You melted into it, your whole body exhaling into the kiss. When you broke away again, it was to press your lips against the corner of his jaw, then along the column of his throat with the barest scrape of teeth. Against his skin, he heard you murmur, “Are you safe, Steve?”

Steve went still and cracked one eye open. He tugged at your waist again, now letting his spine lay out on the mattress, taking you down with him. He knew it was a delay, you also probably knew it was a delay.

You settled half over him, your palm flat against his chest. He knew you weren’t going to let the question go. He could tell that much just from the way you’d propped your chin on your hand, watching him with an expression that had lost all its softness and was now replaced with something a little more frightened.

Steve was stupid, is what he realized then. He was stupid for getting you involved in his mess, for climbing your house instead of going home and licking his wounds alone like he’d been doing this entire time. He was stupid for letting himself want something this soft when his life had turned into a building of things that it could take away without warning.

“I’m here,” was all that came out of his mouth, and he felt like he’d been splashed with a bucket of ice cold water when he saw your crestfallen expression.

It was the truest thing he could have said. He’d learned to hand himself over cheap—Steve was the guy who took things to his face so a kid half his size wouldn’t have to—and somewhere along the way, he’d stopped keeping track of what he was worth on his own, apart from what he could absorb for someone else.

He thought about how wanting a dinner meant wanting, badly, to still be here and to still look forward to something good. He so very badly wanted to spend as long as he could looking forward to you.

He brought his knuckles up to graze your cheek, and let them rest there as he watched you lean into them. “I’m gonna keep coming here long as you’ll let me.”

Your eyes closed, and your face worked through his words. You looked far from satisfied, but almost willing to take what he could give.

“That’s not an answer,” you murmured, no accusation in it, your lips pulling down into a frown.

He let his thumb wander down to the corner of the frown. He swiped at the skin there once. “It’s the truth, though.”

You hummed, eyelashes dipping, crescents against your skin, and Steve watched you settle to let the question go without actually letting it go.

“Wanna do lots of things with you,” he added, voice going into a whisper now.

“Yeah?” Your eyes opened at that. “Like what?”

“Like ask you out on a date like a real gentleman, for starters,” he said, eyes flicking down to your tangle of limbs, how you were straddling him.

“If you ask, I might say yes.”

Steve felt every nerve in his body jump.

“Alright, then. I’m askin’.” His hands found your waist properly now, thumbs fitting over your ribs. “Would you let me take you out? To a nice dinner.”

You pretended to consider it, chin tilting. “I don’t know. The guy asking has a pretty questionable track record. Tried to steal from me the first time I met him.”

A grin crawled onto his lips. “Give him a chance. He cleans up nice.” He squeezed your waist gently, a silent urge. “So? Yes or no? My ego’s riding on this.”

His ego was also pretty fragile now, if he was being honest.

You leaned down slowly, the mattress dipping under the new angle of your weight, your hair falling to curtain both your faces. You pressed your lips to the corner of his mouth—not quite where he wanted it, deliberately drawn out and so maddening—and held it there long enough Steve felt heat climb the back of his neck.

“Yes,” you said finally.

Steve couldn’t help but feel the guilt gnaw at him even as the rest of him went giddy and lighter than he’d felt in months. The thought of you saying yes to him, all of him, while he was still handing you maybe a third of that on any given day felt like breaking your trust.

You deserved a guy who could hand over all of it. But Steve had experienced too much loss in the past few years to not want to latch onto the hope of a future with you, greedy and undeserving as it made him feel to want it anyway.

“You mean it?” he said, voice going rough.

“Don’t make me regret it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear, and let his thumbs stay there this time.